Ah, but that's the joy of UTF8. The standard ASCII character set is a subset of UTF8, so if you're using UTF8 and your users don't post in two-byte characters then it makes no difference to the way your program works.

In Reply To

You explained that s/// should handle this, but maybe the source of my module (attached with first post) could explain the source of this problem.. apparently, it doesn't do that.

You code make no difference. I'm pretty sure it should all just work if you use the utf8 module.